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]]>About mid-February, we noticed our oldest daughter had slight puffiness in her left eyelid. People who didn’t see her every day didn’t seem concerned, and sometimes I would have to look back at old pictures of her just to be sure I wasn’t crazy. It was subtle, but it was there. Several nurses we asked said it was just allergies. In early March, we noticed a small hard lump in the swelling. Someone else told us it was probably just a sty. A week later, we saw an opthamologist. The opthamologist said it was a cyst. He sent us for a CT which also said it was a cyst.
Then we went to maxillofacial to have the cyst removed and they asked for more testing.
Long story short: it isn’t a cyst.
Our oldest daughter has a rare, highly aggressive malignant cancer and our lives will never be the same. We still don’t know what stage it is at or what exactly her treatment will look like. This process is a lot of hurry up and wait, and act normal while something lifechanging is happening. I mean, we got the diagnosis and sent her back to school the next day because what else are we supposed to do? She still needs more tests before she can even start treatment.
People around us ask how we’re really doing and the truth is there is an overwhelming peace. It’s scary. And hard. And I hate that my five year old who is so happy and otherwise healthy right now is about to walk the road of cancer treatments. Still, there is peace.
We have had so many “scares” with this girl. Even before she was born, as I bled heavily at 16 weeks pregnant, we had to trust God with her. When she was born limp, gray, and with heartbeat slower than my own, we had to trust God with her. I had a quote printed and sitting on my dresser that talked about motherhood being a journey of trusting God with your own children.
And now, as she starts this journey, we have to trust her to a God who loves her more than we do. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight. We have been fighting and we will continue to fight. I have taken names, made calls, capitalized on connections and frankly not cared who has been offended in the process. I have been hung up on and yelled at and told to stop coming into the hospital because “it’s not that big of a deal.”
This is my girl and I will never stop fighting for her. At the same time, we can see how God has gone before us, paving the way and making connections where we never could have.
Of all the places for us to be right now, we are in Europe, just 45 minutes away from a leading expert in the *exact* type of cancer she has.
So, if it seems I’ve fallen off the grid, that’s why. It may be that cancer treatment will afford me more time to slow down and write or supporting her and our family may take up every spare moment I have. We simply don’t know.
We just appreciate your prayers.
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]]>If you’re like 80% of humanity, you likely stepped into this year with an idea of things you wanted to change. Run a marathon. Lose weight. Add to your family. Get a new job. Start a business. Read a stack of books. Learn to bake. Buy chickens.
The resolutions are endless.
Maybe you “picked a word” for the upcoming year to help guide your intentions. (My word for 2025 is “delight.”)
But if you’re a Christian woman who struggles with pornography, you may be starting this year with one goal. One hope. One dream. One ambition.
Perhaps you’ve been at this for a while, and this was also your goal last year.
And the year before that.
And the year before that…
You don’t know what you’re going to do different this year. Maybe you can try harder. Maybe you can be more determined and finally figure out the formula for freedom.
But I want to help shift your focus by asking you one question:
If your everyday life didn’t feel overshadowed by pornography, what would everyday life look like?
In my book, Quenched, I talk about freedom. One of the things we have to realize when it comes to freedom is that we aren’t fighting for it; we fight from it.
In John 8, verse 34, Jesus starts talking about slavery to sin. He says:
“Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. Now the slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free. ”
What is He saying? He’s talking about our identity and our place of belonging in Christ and the freedom that He gives us. Not that we earn. Freedom that He gives.
This idea is reinforced throughout the New Testament, especially in Romans. I’ve often called Romans 6-8 “The Freedom Chapters.” They were hugely instrumental in my own journey of freedom and understanding my relationship with my struggle. Over and over in the text, Paul reminds the reader that we are actually in control of our bodies and we are choosing. We are free to choose.
In a world where we talk a lot about addiction and disease, this can be a hard truth to accept. We want to believe that we’re a victim of our circumstances because to do otherwise requires humility and effort. It requires work.
Stop living like you are powerless to overcome it.
I am finishing the study None Like Him by Jen Wilkin. In a chapter on the Immutability (Unchangingness) of God, Jen brings up the idea that our own belief we are unchangable flies in the face of the Gospel and grace.
“The worst part is that, when confronted with my own entrenched sin, my immediate defense is to say, ‘That’s just who I am. I can’t change.’ I can’t change. Immutable. Lie. Lie from the pit of hell. Whether uttered in hopelessness or defiance, this statement is a lie… Just as my assurance of salvation rests in the fect that God cannot change, my hope of sanctification rests in the fact that I can. What greater disavowal of the gospel of grace than to claim it is capable of changing every sinner’s heart but mine?” (pg. 87-88)
The fact is, you can change. The very message of grace is that you can change.
You are free to choose.
So as you come into this year, I want to ask you what that freedom looks like.
I don’t believe in “manifesting” but imagine it for a moment. Who is the woman you are pretending to be? Who is the woman you wish you were? What does it look like for you to be free?
Maybe it looks like deeper friendships. Maybe it looks like more joy. Healed relationships. A healthier sex life in your marriage. Less time on your phone. More time involved in activities.
What’s keeping you from doing those things now?
There’s a lie we can believe that says we have to get free first and then…
Obviously, we have to be careful that we aren’t putting on a facade. Don’t try to outperform your pornography addiction.
But sometimes we treat our struggle with sin like a bout with leprosy and exile ourselves outside of the camp clothed in sackloth and ashes, waiting to be made whole again. And that’s not the life Jesus promised us.
You can work on healing relationships while simultaneously working on breaking free from pornography. In fact, healing relationships might actually help you to break free from pornography.
One of the most powerful parts of my own healing journey was this sort of “simultaneous work.” After I confessed my struggle in college, one woman met with me specifically about the addiction. Aside from her, I had a team of women who helped me answer the question, “Who is Jessica without this?” Because I honestly had no idea. So much of my life, identity, and emotions were wrapped up in porngraphy that I seriously questionned whether there could be a Jessica without it.
But there was. And they helped me realize my identity in Christ. They helped me work on my emotional stability, on healthy relationships, on a Godly perspective of sex, all while I was actively working on quitting pornography. The two timelines weren’t mutually exclusive.
And the same can be true for you.
If you want this year to be the year you break free from pornography, then I challenge you to answer the question:
What does it look like when you do?
And then live like someone who has been set free, and fight from that place.
The freedom He offers is not the “freedom to do whatever we want.” The freedom He offers us is freedom from our own out-of-control drives. It’s a freedom from what the Bible calls the slavery of sin. When we decide the freedom we want is “indoor plumbing” it falls short of the freedom Christ offers. He wants to quench our thirst. He wants to free us from our longing for water.
The freedom of the Gospel and God’s desire for us is freedom from our longing for things that don’t satisfy. It’s not freedom to watch porn without shame; it’s freedom from the need to watch porn. It’s not freedom to lust without inhibition; it’s freedom from the traps of lust.
The freedom He offers us is a complete and whole freedom freeing us from our past mistakes, our present struggles, and our future shame. It’s more than pumping water straight to us so we can hide and stay where we are. The offer is better water.
-excerpt from my book Quenched: Discovering God’s Abundant Grace For Women Struggling with Pornography and Sexual Shame
If you’re a woman trying to break free from pornography, you can find more resources here.
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]]>That’s the comment left on a Youtube video of one time when I shared my story. You know what they say: Never read the comments.
I know the attitude behind the comment was one of condescension. It’s an exaggerated eye roll and a sigh that says, ‘Suuuuuure she’s free.’
It’s the voice of shame so many women hear. “You’ll never be free. You’ll never escape. You can’t run. I will find you.”
It’s a common question, and I completely understand why. There was a time in my journey when I felt like I couldn’t get rid of the images stored in my mind. They would recall at the absolute worst times.
I’d sit down to pray, close my eyes and there they were.
I’d be sitting in Bible college class, and it’s like I couldn’t get them out of my head. The videos. The pictures. The sounds. It felt cruel and unfair. I didn’t want this, so why couldn’t I even stop remembering it?
I share this in my book, Beggar’s Daughter. This is one of the things I feel makes pornography addiction so unique. You can’t cut off from it. It’s not possible.
If you struggle with alcohol, I can take your alcohol away.
If you struggle with substances, I can control your access.
When it comes to pornography, you cannot “cut it out.” Even if you aren’t consuming new content, you have reserves of old content stored in your mind.
When you’re in the middle of that, it’s hard to believe you can ever be free of that. The best version of freedom you can think of is a life on the run, constantly dodging errant thoughts and memories.
And sadly, I feel this is a version of freedom perhaps unwittingly promoted in churches. Even though the Bible says it right there in plain black and white that our minds can be renewed, we have a really really hard time grasping the concept of victory in the battlefield of the mind. Victory, as we tell it, looks like holding a remote control and constantly changing the channel back. It looks like “bouncing your eyes.”
It looks like fearful avoidance.
I’m here to tell you, there is a better version of freedom out there. A version in which the images, videos, and sounds stop chasing you and lie dormant, dust-covered in some attic crawl space somewhere. They’re there. But you have to go looking for them.
Instead of fearful avoidance there is a freedom and awareness.
How do you get there? Well, I wish I had a simple recipe for that, and perhaps someone somewhere does. I don’t. But what I do have is this promise from Romans 12:2: that our minds can be renewed.
Science supports this. Entire books have been written about the phenomenon of neuroplasticity which is essentially how the brain can rewire itself. Programs can be rewritten.
I recently read a study on learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological term for when we resign ourselves to our fate. When we believe that this is just the way things are and there is no way we can change it.
My husband and I saw this while in New Zealand. On one of our trips, we drove by farms of deer. Having lived quite some time in Maryland, and having a brother who hunts, I know deer are capable of jumping quite high. So I found it interesting that these herds were quite content to stay inside their enclosures with fences no more than four foot tall.
Do you know why the deer don’t leave? our driver asked.
Because they were raised behind higher fences that they couldn’t jump over. So they gave up trying.
Learned helpessness.
Now that the deer were turned out to pasture, they didn’t realize they could clear the fence.
In this study I read, animals with learned helplessness were able to overcome it by accomplishing smaller tasks.
Our brains can be rewired.
Perhaps a lot of our feelings of defeat come when we feel like God has some sort of eraser and we just assume that one day we’re going to wake up and forget who we are, what we did, what we’ve seen- all of it.
While that would be lovely, especially when it comes to areas of our lives that carry so much shame, that’s not how it works.
1- Take thoughts captive.
In college, the strategy discussed was “change the channel.” When lustful thoughts come, we were supposed to change the channel. Think on things that are good, lovely, honest… (Philippians 4:8). In hindsight, it’s similar to how I was taught to handle emotions growing up. Just ignore them.
I think the hope is if we just ignore them, they will go away. But in my own journey, I found it far more helpful and powerful to actually call the errant thoughts out.
Shame tells you to run. Shame tells you to hide. Ignorance and silence are hallmarks of shame.
But grace calls us into the light and into connection and community.
So instead of frantically reaching for a mental remote to “change the channel,” exercise 2 Corinthians 10:5 and start waging war on these thoughts. Stop running scared and start taking prisoners.
What does this look like? The next time your memory recalls a video, photo, or sound, stop what you’re doing and call it out in prayer. Name it. “God I am having this thought right now about ((insert descriptor)) and I am taking it captive and I am giving it to you.”
What are you doing? You are retraining your brain. You are telling it, “This pathway is now closed. It’s off limits.”
2- Heal the root.
So often an addiction to pornography is meeting a non sexual need. It might be how you cope with stress. It might be how you process trauma. It might be how you find your sense of love and belonging.
If you don’t know what might be triggering your struggle, you can check out this free e course.
This is why ignorance isn’t always helpful, because the struggle is itself part of a bigger struggle. The book Unwanted is a phenomenal resource in this exact area. Shame will tell you that you are a bad person for having this struggle and that if you could just have some self control, you would be able to get out of this. The reality is, freedom so often looks like healing.
If you don’t know what might be underlying your struggle with pornography, or if you have an idea but no idea where to start, I highly recommend talking to a licensed Christian counselor.
3- Celebrate small victories.
Remember, learned helplessness can be overcome as you realize you can do hard things. If you catch yourself looking at pornography but close the moment you feel convicted, that’s a victory. On paper it may look like a failure, but you were responsive. You got out of there. That’s growth.
You made it a week without watching porn when you used to watch it for hours a day? That’s a victory. Have you won the war yet? No, but you are starting to gain ground.
As you celebrate those little steps, you will find yourself coming out from under the grip of shame and will find yourself rejoicing in freedom. As you do that, the things you used to watch lose their power.
Yes, it takes time. It takes time for any memory to fade.
To that woman in the comments, I don’t remember the scenes. I don’t recall them. Could I? Sure. In the same way I might be able to recall a sixth grade science project. If I sat and thought about it, I absolutely could, but I don’t want to and I don’t need to. And, to me, that is freedom.
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]]>“It’s not a one-time conversation.”
“You have to talk to them once you give them access to the internet because pornography is a predator.”
“Use anatomically correct words.”
“Don’t be embarrassed.”
It’s really easy to say it when you’re the “expert” teaching parents. But I blushed the first time I had to use anatomically correct words to answer my daughter’s questions about her body.
I hid the book Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr on our office bookshelf. The day my girls discovered it, I literally sat on it until they forgot they had asked me to read it.
While I was pregnant, my daughter asked me how baby brother got in my belly, and my mind flew into a panic. Then she asked how he was going to get out and my brain just hit the “delete” button.
I had to ask myself, “Why am I so embarrassed to talk about this?
All those years I had told parents how to do this, but as a parent, it just feels so difficult! Why?
For parents, especially those who grew up in purity culture, there’s a lot of talk about “stealing innocence.” We don’t want to “awaken love before its time” (which is not what that verse means) by talking to our kids about sex too young. We think there is wisdom in waiting, in hiding, in veiling.
But, I said this in my book, sometimes what we perceive to be wisdom is actually shame.
When we don’t talk about sex in the name of “protecting innocence” what are we saying about sex? That knowing about it is a bad thing. That those who know about it are “guilty” or “impure.” That it is wrong, dirty, even dangerous.
This line of thinking is what will cause parents to shatter when their children find pornography. “What happened to my sweet, innocent, little girl?”
This line of thinking is what causes parents to wait until bridal showers to talk to their daughters about sex.
While the sexual desires of young men are acknowledged and discussed, sexual desire among women (especially Christian women) tends to be demonized. Only worldly, carnal, harlots think about sex, not good Christian girls.
This line of thinking heaps shame on women who struggle with issues like pornography, because “innocent” and “pure” women don’t even know about sex much less seek it out or fantasize about it. It’s the Proverbs 5 vs Proverbs 31 dichotomy that I see so often in Christian circles. You are either the good Christian girl (read: wife) who doesn’t think about sex, washes dishes, cares for the needy, etc, etc or you are the Proverbs 5 harlot who knows too much and will cause the downfall of many a great and stalwart Christian man. It’s an us verses them. The “innocent” versus the “corrupt.” We have ourselves absolutely convinced that talking to our children about sex corrupts them.
When we preach that sexual ignorance is optimal and innocent, we preach that sexual knowledge in and of itself is shameful. We shroud sex, not in mystery and glory and beauty, but in shame.
I struggled so much to talk with my girls about sex and pornography partly because I was ashamed of it. I was embarrassed by what I knew. It’s the same sentiment an old college roommate shared with me years ago. “You know the most embarrassing thing about getting pregnant?” she said, “it’s that now everyone knows you have had sex.”
For generations, there has been so much shame and embarrassment around healthy sex and intimacy. While it might be in the name of “protecting God’s plan for sex,” it has actually damaged it.
Talking to our kids about sex doesn’t rob their innocence, it protects them. It honors how God designed them. It honors God’s design for sex.
I knew I had to set aside my own discomfort and start talking to my girls about these things. Because I can’t claim something is beautiful and amazing and at the same time be ashamed of it.
That doesn’t mean I am sitting down and explaining the birds and the bees. That’s not where they are right now (ages 2.5 and 4). Instead, I’m looking at this whole thing like a puzzle. It is put together piece-by-piece, a little at a time. Knowing correct words for body parts is a piece. Understanding reproduction is a piece. Recognizing the value of human life is a piece. Knowing how to express emotions in a healthy way is a piece! Knowing how to have healthy and safe relationships is a piece. Modeling healthy and safe relationships is a piece.
As a mom, I have the whole picture. I have the box lid. I understand a lot about sex, about reproduction, about sexual maturity, about intimacy, even sexual coercion, trauma, and abuse. I worked in a crisis pregnancy center, had my own years-long addiction to pornography, and have taken college level anatomy courses. There’s a lot I know that my kids don’t need to know yet, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to know anything. I’ve seen what damage that can do firsthand sitting across from 14 year old girls who have no understanding of how their bodies work or how they even got pregnant.
Historically, parents have just kind of thrown the entire puzzle, box and all, at their teenage (or even adult) children and said, “Good luck!”
Over the past few months, we’ve had some practice and here’s what I have found:
Sex is about more than sex.
I alluded to this earlier but we really have to step away from the formulaic “tab A into slot B” mechanical approach we have to discussing sex. Sex is not about sex. Therefore, a healthy and solid foundation for conversations about sex isn’t made up of only conversations about sex.
Healthy sexuality involves so much more than what we do with our reproductive systems. It involves desire, intimacy, relationships, self control, emotional safety, and so much more. These are character traits and concepts I can teach my children long before I connect them to the sexual experience.
How I talk to my daughters about their bodies will influence their understanding of sex. How I talk to my daughters about men will influence their understanding of sex. I can teach them how to have safe boundaries and how to recognize unsafe behavior. I can teach them how to cope with big emotions so they aren’t tempted to run to unhealthy coping mechanisms. They can learn about the importance of friendships and community so they are less likely to be preyed upon. They can learn about forgiveness and grace, so they are less likely to fall victim to crushing shame.
All of those things, though not specifically about the mechanics of sex, have a profound impact on how they will grow to understand sex. The same is true about conversations about pornography. Pornography is the biggest proponent of “sex is just about sex.” Pornography introduces violence and pushing of boundaries. It robs sex of intimacy, emotion, and personhood.
If I want my daughters to be resilient and resistant to the messages of pornography, I can’t be silent. I need to be speaking a better narrative. It is not enough to say, “that’s bad, stay away from it.”
What about it is bad? What about it is unhealthy? And years from now when we have those conversations, I want to be able to build off of conversations we have now.
The more you have these conversations, the less scary and awkward they feel.
When my oldest saw me changing baby brother’s diaper one day and asked what was “wrong” with him, I explained that this was the way God made him, using anatomically correct words. When she later asked my husband if he also had one of those, my husband shot me a look and then answered yes.
Yes, it may feel awkward the first time you use the correct word for anatomy instead of swatting hands and calling things “yucky.” It might feel like you have a mouth full of peanut butter as you try to spit out the words, and then, if you have toddlers, repeat them several times. Yes, it might be super embarassing when you drop your daughter off at children’s church and she announces that her baby brother has a penis. (I’m picturing that scene from the 1990 comedy, Kindergarten Cop). But normalizing this vocabulary has actually been proven to be helpful in protecting children from sexual abuse.
When my daughters first brought me Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Jr, I sat on it because I was so uncomfortable reading it to them. I felt like having Guided Access on the iPad was enough. We now read Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Jr on the regular and even make a game out of finding the hidden cameras.
The more you have these conversations, the more insight you gain into your children.
Let me tell you, my four year old is absolutely amazing. She is so much fun to have conversations with and there are times she absolutely blows me away. Recently, she has been in this pattern of encouraging. Whenever I am feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, she’ll say, “It’s ok, mommy. You need to take the bad thoughts out and give those to Jesus so He can put the good thoughts in!”
That’s what we get to do as parents. We get to lay this framework for life, relationships, and faith. It’s not something fearful. Goodness, it’s a privilege.
Sex is part of that overall conversation. It’s part of life and it is a good and beautiful part of life. That’s what I want them to believe, and if that’s what I want them to believe, that’s the narrative I have to have from day 1.
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]]>This is how it was even decades ago when I, a Christian teenage girl, searched for help for my porn addiction. For years, I thought my consumption of pornography was healthy and even normal. I saw it as a safer alternative to sleeping around and a way for me to express and explore my sexuality while still honoring all of the tenants of purity culture.
My church didn’t talk about pornography, other than vague mentions of “Men, what you are looking at on the computer.” My family didn’t talk about pornography, other than to say people who watched it were sick.
I didn’t personally have a problem with pornography until I tried to stop watching it… and found I couldn’t stop.
That feeling of no longer being in control of my actions and instead being controlled by something else is what led me to search for help.
I couldn’t find anything. As I searched and searched the internet for ways to break free, I found resource after resource for men. Books. Articles. Support Groups. But nothing for women.
That searched introduced a question that would haunt me for a few years.
I’m not the only woman who has asked that question. In fact, it’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed in nearly every email I have received. Because of the lack of conversation and resources, Christian women who struggle with pornography often feel alone in that struggle.
It seems to be a general rule that men will struggle with pornography. I once read an interview with a college counselor and he said something to the effect of “we just assume that 100% of our male students have an issue with pornography.” Yet, the same is not said for women. In fact, I think if you were to ask many pastors, college counselors, ministry leaders, or youth group leaders, while the whole might assume 100% of men have a problem (which is an unhealthy and unhelpful assumption) they would also assume the number of women with this problem to be zero.
I’ve found this to be the case time and again as I have written and spoken over the past 14 years.
People just assume women don’t have this problem, but that assumption is dangerous.
But where does it come from? Why do we assume porn isn’t a problem for women?
I think the answer is, in part, because we aren’t talking about it. So, in a sense, it is a vicious cycle of circular reasoning. We don’t talk about it so we don’t hear about it, and when we don’t hear anything about it, we assume it isn’t an issue. But when we don’t talk about it, those with the issue don’t feel they can say anything, so we continue hearing nothing and assuming it isn’t a problem.
When I first started writing and sharing my story, even though it was my own lived experience, a number of editors, pastors, and ministry leaders invalidated it. “Women don’t have this problem,” “it’s not like women sit around watching hours of porn,” “we don’t need that kind of discussion corrupting the women in our church.”
I’ve found two common approaches to interpreting what I mean when I tell people I am a Christian woman who used to be addicted to pornography. They either water down what I mean by “addicted” or they assume that when I say “pornography” I’m talking about romance novels and erotica.
While it may seem like these people lack compassion and care, what I’ve actually found over the years is that the silence around women struggling is more in part to lack of awareness.
Men have decades of experience explaining why men struggle with pornography. After all, men are visually wired, right? This, by default, has left men also in charge of explaining why or if women struggle with pornography. So, while men are “visually wired” women are more “emotionally wired” so, of course, women aren’t going to struggle with pornography. This is the narrative that informs not only our conversations on pornography but our conversations on other topics like purity and modesty. It’s why men have pancake breakfasts to address pornography while women have ladies’ teas to talk about true beauty and being godly wives.
Men being “visually wired” and “unable to control their urges” is what leads us to rules about skirt length and sleeve width for women. It’s what leads to arguments supporting things like marital rape. It’s what leads to the discounting, disregarding, and even demonizing of female sexual pleasure. I stumbled across an excerpt from an old Christian marriage book written by a woman in which she informed new brides that it was ungodly for them to enjoy sex.
The narrative is flawed and has been from the start.
Ask any young woman and she will tell you that women can absolutely be visually aroused. The shirtless men at the beach? Phew! The pastor in his fitted suit? Mercy me!
Porn wasn’t an issue for men just because “God made men that way” (He didn’t). Porn was an issue primarily for men because men were the only ones with access. As women started gaining independence, working outside of the home, and with the advent of the internet, women started having autonomy and access. And the result is, they also struggle.
The porn idustry has accomodated this too. It is a business, after all, and like any good business, once you get a new audience, you start to market content to them. So, as women began having access to pornography, pornography began making itself accessible and acceptable to women.
We built an entire argument on the wrong foundation, assuming that men struggled with pornography so much because something in them as men made them struggle. Conversely, we assumed that something in women made it so they wouldn’t struggle.
The reality is men and women struggle with pornography because there’s something in both of us that was created to enjoy sex.
But changing a long-standing narrative isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. It takes a lot of convincing. It takes people speaking up and sharing their stories and being willing to stick with it and talk about this.
It’s because resources for women fight against a decades-long narrative that this isn’t an issue for women. It’s because the women who struggle and need these resources often feel alone and trapped in shame and silence. They desperately need the help but are too afraid to ask.
I’ve told several pastors, podcasters, and radio hosts that if people realized the magnitude of the problem heading their way, they would be scrambling to do something about it. But the reality is, we can’t often see problems until they are swallowing us. In a world where we are surrounded by brokenness and evil, where we are distracted by politics and trends, we can be blind to the real enemies sneaking into our ranks and destroying us from the inside out.
Thankfully, the conversation is changing. I have seen it even in the years I’ve been doing this.
As more women are willing to step up and share their stories, there are a growing number of books and resources on the market for women who struggle with pornography. My book, Quenched, released this January. There are groups and influencers on various social media platforms speaking out on the issue. Ministries that originally catered only to men now have material for women as well. Authors are beginning to talk about pornography as something both men and women struggle with (because it is).
All of this serves to raise awareness and break down the wall of shame and silence. It starts rewriting the narrative on female sexual expression, even in the church. As that happens, more and more women will be comfortable coming forward to share their story. As that happens, pastors, ministry leaders, editors, publishers, and more will start pursuing resources to help.
In other words, if you are a Christian woman struggling with pornography and looking for resources, be encouraged. You are not alone. The tide is changing and more help is coming.
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]]>Good. for. you, young sir!
I recall many many (many) years ago sitting in church wondering the same thing. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time (I didn’t go on my first date until I was 27!) but was still curious about “the rules.” Unfortunately, the canned Christian response was almost always, “Stop asking where the line is and how close you can get to it and worry about drawing closer to Jesus.”
On one hand, it’s a fair response. On the other, it is wildly presumptive and anemic. At the end of the day, it’s really not helpful or even practical.
At the same time, courtesy of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, there was an entire debate around if dating was even OK or if everyone should just somehow know they were going to marry a person five minutes after learning their name.
So, I want to try to do better as a woman who grew up in purity culture, who did date before meeting and marrying my husband and who is now married.
Boundaries is a bit of a buzz word in so many areas of culture. Currently, it tends to have more to do with things like boundaries with toxic family members or friends. About a year ago, a friend of mine wrote about boundaries and someone commented in response, “Boundaries aren’t in the Bible!”
Oh, but they are.
In the context of general relationships and interaction with people, we see where Jesus withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16). We see where Jesus tells his disciples to leave towns and people who are unwelcoming (Matthew 10:14). Perhaps most famously, we have Paul saying that just because he can do something doesn’t mean he should (1 Corinthians 6:12).
Each of those is an example of a “boundary.” They are lines in the sand, so to speak. In a general sense, it is good to have boundaries and convictions.
When it comes to romantic relationships, a lot of us don’t have an example of what dating looks like. Most of us have never seen our parents date; we’ve only seen them married. We haven’t seen our pastors or ministry leaders date; we’ve only seen them married. We may see our friends or older siblings date but the reality is, they’re trying to figure it out just like everyone else.
Hollywood and pornography offer warped and unrealistic interpretations of romantic relationships, often short-circuiting the actual process of intimacy. Romance novels offer unrealistic ideals.
Bottom line: most of us don’t have an example to look up to when it comes to boundaries in dating.
We see the end result, but how do you get there? How do you navigate the road from “Hi, my name is Joe” to “will you marry me?” Because there needs to be a road there. There needs to be a lot of words and things that happen between those two phrases.
I think it’s helpful if we start by reframing how we view boundaries. For a lot of us, we view them as the barbed wire fence that keeps us from danger. This is one of the downsides of how the purity culture framed sex. Sex became dangerous. The thing that could get you pregnant and ruin your life. The thing that could turn you from a beautiful rose into a stem of thorns with no petals. The thing that could give you an STD.
We turned sex into this radioactive failing power plant and started throwing up walls around it.
Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about. Don’t you even dare ask how to avoid it, just stay far far away. This is at least the message a lot of Christian women got in youth group.
And then we’re supposed to somehow waltz into it unafraid on our wedding day. It’s like Cinderella in reverse. Now, when the clock strikes midnight, the nasty rotten pumpkin and field mice turn into a gorgeous white carriage pulled by prestigious horses. Everything that was “dirty, wicked, and bad” just moments before somehow magically transforms into amazing and beautiful after you say I do.
That’s not how this works.
So instead of viewing boundaries as something that keeps us from some big, dangerous scary thing, let’s talk about what boundaries actually are.
Regardless of their context and application, boundaries are about honor- treating with esteem, dignity, and respect. You could also say boundaries are about protecting what you cherish, what you find important. We can have boundaries in friendships, in family, in work relationships.
In the context of dating, we want boundaries that:
It’s less about a list of rules and lines and more about an overall attitude. Instead of asking, “Is this safe?” or “Is God OK with this?” a better question is “how is this honoring God, myself, or the other person?”
I have a great example of this from my own life. About ten years ago, I was in the online dating world and met an amazing pastor and farmer from North Dakota we’ll call Beau (not his name). We chatted back and forth online for a bit before finally deciding to be official. From the beginning, one of the things Beau said was that we would be all in but the moment either of us felt there was no way we could marry the other, we would let the other person know.
That might seem like a horrible way to kick off a relationship, but it actually was a very honoring way to start things. He was letting me know that he was going to honor my heart by not stringing me along and he was asking me to do the same. I agreed. We made it our purpose to make sure that if the relationship ended, the other person would leave whole and hopefully better for knowing each other.
Well, I’ll tell you, we got to a point in our relationship that we decided the next best step was to meet in person. Beau’s dad was sick with cancer and it was some special season on the farm, so we made arrangements for me to fly out to see him and stay on the farm in his parent’s house, where he also lived. There were no hotels nearby (it is North Dakota, after all) so I stayed in a guest bedroom in their house. His parents were in their room on the first floor and Beau’s room was across the hall from the room where I was staying.
But Beau was not.
For the few days I stayed there, Beau slept in the basement, with the door open so there was accountability. He would only go up to his room if he knew I was elsewhere in the house. Honor.
He didn’t do it out of fear of me or what could happen. We were two grown adults who deeply respected each other and truly cared for each other. He chose to do that out of honor.
We were alone together often in those few days, having meaningful conversation. One day, we went for a ride in his truck to a nearby park, walked, and talked. That was actually the beginning of the end for us. He shared some of the struggle his heart was having, how he was really wrestling with a relationship he had just lost months before we started talking. How he just couldn’t explain how he felt.
He was honoring me by letting me know how he was feeling. I honored him in return by acknowledging that his healing was more important than whatever we may or may not have going on at the time. I actually gave him permission in that conversation to reach out to his ex to see if there was still something there. I still remember him being blown away by that level of grace.
As we drove back to his house, I was fairly sure we were done. The cold North Dakota air made the windows of his truck fog up as we talked about how to face his parents (who had straight up told him he would be an idiot if he didn’t marry me). As we sat in the driveway with fogged up windows, I held back some laughter. It would have been funny if the content of our conversation wasn’t so sad.
Keep in mind, I grew up in the purity culture, and a lot of the “rules” around dating looked like: never be alone with a man, ever. Because you never know what is going to happen and even if nothing happens you never know what people are going to think happened.
To anybody outside of that truck, it looked like a scene from a rom com- two lovers alone with steamy windows. But inside that truck, we were two people desperately trying to honor each other while navigating the pain of a break up.
When Beau dropped me off at the airport, he walked with me inside. My flight was delayed for hours due to the North Dakota winter and, wanting to be sure I got home safely, Beau sat with me and waited. Honor.
We didn’t really talk much. I remember staring at his muddy farm boots a lot as he quietly asked for space and time to sort through what was going on. Even still, he rode with me to the top of the escalator, escorting me as far as he could before waving goodbye.
About a week or so later, we had the official conversation that ended it all. One of the things we asked each other was if there was anything we could do to help the other walk away whole.
Honor.
Beau got married to the next girl he met- a farm girl, like he had always imagined. They have three beautiful children and he is living his dream. How do I know this? Because his mom absolutely insisted she and I stay in touch. So every year I get a Christmas update on their little family. Beau and I have emailed a handful of times over the years, just checking in on each other’s families.
In the culture I grew up in, there were so many different “boundaries” that were broken in that relationship (and I’m going to talk about that in a second), but that relationship is far more God-honoring than the one that followed.
The relationship that followed Beau was another online relationship with a young man from Alaska. I highlight this relationship in my book, Beggar’s Daughter. We talked back and forth for a year, but there was never any committment on his part to honor my heart. For nearly a year I wondered what exactly we were. He would call me his best friend and we would talk a LOT but there was never intentionality about anything. I finally pressed the issue nine months in asking what would need to happen to move things along.
Little did I know at the same time we were having that conversation, one of his pastors was trying to set him up with a young woman from church. The pastor reportedly asked him, “What’s going on with that girl from Maryland?” And he shrugged me off, “Eh, nothing much. I don’t think we’re going to amount to anything.” So, off he went on a date with the woman from his church, and he continued to date her for three months until she demanded honor and gave him an ultimatum. Either he felt they were going somewhere or she was going to head back home (as she was in Alaska for a job).
He chose her. I didn’t even know about her. I didn’t know about the conversation three months earlier when he told a pastor that we weren’t going to amount to anything. For three months, I had believed we were making steady progress toward a future together, talking about whether we wanted kids, what life could look like in a couple years and why he didn’t own a microwave.
I felt a prompting to reach out to him one day as I was finishing up Beggar’s Daughter and sensed something was up so I called him on it. That’s when I found out about everything and the relationship ended. I was hurt. I was angry. It felt like a betrayal, and I did look up the name of his pastor who set him up with this girl and I did write that pastor a long email about the importance of honoring people’s hearts and how I wasn’t just some nameless “girl from Maryland.” While I probably wouldn’t do that again, for me, at the time, it felt like defending my honor, since obviously Mr. Alaska had no intention of doing so.
We never met in person. I never sat with him in a truck with fogged up windows, but the relationship with the man from Alaska was far more damaging and dishonoring than the one from North Dakota.
This is what can happen when we make boundaries all about “staying away from sex” and not about honoring God and each other. We have broken and damaged hearts, not because they slept together but because they dishonored each other.
For years, I heard about how having sex could leave me like chipped china or chewed up bubble gum. Everything was about virginity. Never once did I hear a message about honor and value and caring for the other person in a relationship. It was all about being afraid that if the setting was right, or if I was wearing the wrong thing, or if I looked at him the wrong way, I was going to stumble out of that relationship a rose with one less petal.
Looking back as a mom, a former high school teacher, a former crisis pregnancy counselor, a former porn addict- it infuriates me.
Because the message that young men and women need is NOT “do not have sex.” The message they need is about their value and worth as human beings created in the image of God and the high calling and responsibility we all have to honor each other. We don’t need “boys will be boys” and “girls will be harlots.” We don’t need that.
Some things to consider:
Boundaries may look different in different seasons. A healthy boundary for a 27-year-old may be way too lax for a 14-year-old so it is important to understand your own limitations and your own temptations. Obviously, when you are younger, you also need to consider any sort of family expectations and honor those as well.
Boundaries when you’ve just met someone will look different than the boundaries when you are engaged. The boundaries when you are engaged will look different than the boundaries when you are married (because yes, there are still boundaries in marriage!). In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. What works for one person may be absolutely unhelpful for another.
Boundaries should care for the “weaker” person. This is a Biblical concept. Just because something is ok for you doesn’t mean it’s ok for the other person. If it’s not ok for the other person, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Again, this is about honor. It’s not honoring to use your perceived rights to steamroll another person’s conscience.
When you consider boundaries ask yourself if the boundary is honoring. Is it triggering for you? Is it triggering for the other person? Is it tempting either of you?
My husband and I didn’t kiss until our wedding day. Not because I have some rule about it but because I know me and I know full well that kissing that man would have made me dive headlong into trouble. So we saved that for the day when we felt free to finally dive headlong into things- our wedding day. We shared our first kiss about an hour or two before our wedding. He waited because I asked him to, because I needed him to. When it came to sexual struggles in our relationship, unsurprisingly, I was the weaker one so a lot of the boundaries were mine and he honored them.
That is something we carry into our marriage- a mutual love and honor for each other.
This is why it is important to frame boundaries less about what we’re “allowed” to do sexually and more about how people can honor each other. If you walk into marriage thinking that once you say “I do” all of the boundaries are out the window, you are wrong. Boundaries, respect, honor, and cherishing each other is something that will serve you very well before and during marriage.
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]]>The post Is There Hope After a Struggle with Pornography? appeared first on Beggar's Daughter.
]]>I have been asked that question countless times over the last few months as I’ve been on various podcasts and radio shows talking about my book, Quenched. So many presenters and hosts want to leave their listeners with a soundbite that offers a glimmer of hope.
I’m always happy to provide it and to share that there was a point in my own story (several, actually) where I felt hopeless. At 17, I felt like I was too far gone to ever be rescued. I would never be free from my struggle with pornography. At 27, even though I was free, I began to question if my life would “go” anywhere. Would I be single forever? So I love to share that the message of grace is a message of hope. I sit here nearly 20 years after those dark days in Christian college when I sent nudes to a complete stranger, happily married, a mom to two amazing kids, with one more on the way, amazing opportunities for ministry, and more.
So, yes, there’s hope.
But being asked the question over and over again has made me ask a different question:
I think it says something for the gravity of this struggle and the conversation surrounding it if it causes us to question whether we can ever be free or have hope.
Hope and freedom are at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. They are at the heart of the Gospel.
And yet those of us who claim to know Christ and to love and follow Him can be so ensnared by our struggles and so hemmed in by the narratives around us that we begin to wonder.
Can life ever be good again?
Will these images ever go away?
Am I ever going to shake this?
Will anyone ever love me?
Will I ever be able to outrun the shame?
Could our marriage actually survive?
Will I ever feel normal?
I want to challenge you for a moment to dig a little deeper.
These are surface fears and questions. The symptoms of a fracture that extends far below. It’s the equivalent of asking if we can paint over mold without first figuring out where the mold is coming from and fixing that.
Ask yourself why you feel life could never be good again. Ask yourself why you fear no one could ever love you.
And if you’re honest, I would guess that the answer can tie back to a flawed belief about God, grace, and/or sin. This desperate quest for hope, to me, seems to ultimately be a question of “God are you really big enough for this?” Because we are surrounded by messaging that seems to suggest otherwise.
When I first started looking for help twenty years ago, I stumbled across a group that labeled the sin of pornography “greater than the sin of Adam.” To this group pornography was absolutely the worst thing a person could ever do. Worse than flinging all of humanity onto a collision course with eternal separation from God.
That’s heavy. It’s also flawed.
But if you’re someone looking for help, you’ve likely seen statements similar to this. Some anti-porn groups, in an attempt to motivate people out of their porn use overemphasis the harmful effects of pornography and, unintentionally, make people feel hopeless.
They share that one thing serial killers have in common is their use of pornography. What started as an accidental exposure in fifth grade now has you fearing you’re two steps away from being the next Aileen Wournos. You were looking for help and answers and instead got condemnation.
They talk about how pornography destroys marriages and share story after story of couples that were completely devastated by a spouse’s porn use and soon you’re a wife fearing for your own marriage.
They share the statistics about pornography and human trafficking and now you feel like you’re no better than the pimp down the street selling off underaged girls.
Christians can talk a lot about truth. We talk about how truth isn’t relative but absolute. We encourage people to go to the Bible for God’s view of ourselves, each other, sex, and so many other things. I want to encourage you to go to the Bible for the truth about sin and grace.
Because the entire storyline of the Bible is about a God who pursues and longs to bring a wayward people back to Himself. It’s all about the hope we have because of God’s grace (His goodness). Which is why, for me, it is so heartbreaking when people ask me to say something that can give them hope.
You don’t need me to say anything.
God promises it. God promises freedom. We see in the Bible that He makes us new creations, that He gives us abundant life, that He sets us free, that He makes us blameless, that we can renew our minds, that we can have peace and stability in life, that He will give us wisdom…
I could go on.
So when we question whether there is hope after a struggle with pornography, what we’re really asking is if God and all of His promises are accessible to us, and the answer is yes. There is no reason they wouldn’t be. Yet shame will tell us God is distant and wants nothing to do with us. This was the entire impetus behind writing Quenched– to tackle the shame that cuts us off from God. If shame can cut us off from God and make us reliant on other people for our comfort, hope, and stability, it’s winning.
A struggle with pornography is not a death sentence. If you’re wondering if there is hope for you, you don’t need to scour the internet to find someone who has been right where you are who can prove that things can change. Our ultimate source of hope is the character and person of God. Even if no one else in the world had ever been through what you’ve been through, even if no one else struggled with what you struggled with, it wouldn’t leave you without a way out. If you have Him, then there is always hope.
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]]>The post Three Things I Wish Parents Understood About Their Kids and Porn appeared first on Beggar's Daughter.
]]>Most parents don’t want their five, six, seven, or even ten year old exposed to adult content.
What that tends to result in, in many Christian families, are parents who pretend like pornography doesn’t exist. They put what they feel are necessary safeguards in place to protect their home and children. Then they hold on to “the talk” like it’s a bomb that has to be detonated at just the right time or else everything is ruined.
I’ve been speaking in the field of pornography addiction and struggle for over ten years now and, for a while, I did parent education workshops. As I’ve done interviews for my book, Quenched, the question has often come up:
Here are three things I wish parents would know.
We need to understand that pornography and lust are not synonymous. This is hard because the narrative for adults is pornography is a sin of lust. We consider a married person’s porn use the same as cheating. Among adults, we address the issues of pornography, fantasy, masturbation, etc under the umbrella of lust.
But that’s adults (or at least young adults). Adults who know better. Adults who are consciously aware of their choices. Adults who even understand what sexual lust is (because lust isn’t in and of itself always sexual).
But when we’re talking about children, especially young children, it is important to separate lust and pornography. Why? Because for young children, lust is not their motivator.
Pornography is an external product.
Lust is an internal posture.
This is helpful for parents because it creates a shift in our minds.
If I discover my daughter is watching, reading, or listening to pornography (because there’s a new wave of porn that’s like porn podcasts), at nine years old, and my mentality is that porn and lust are bedfellows, I’m going to react to the wrong root. I’m going to start treating my daughter like she struggles with lust and that likely isn’t the case. I might overreact and cut her off from friends who I think are being a bad influence. I might start making rules about clothes and things that don’t apply to what she’s dealing with.
I’m going to address the issue from a sin angle and try to uproot a sin that she doesn’t even struggle with. Doing so can cause feelings of shame for both her and I. After all, I don’t want my friends thinking my nine year old is a floozy.
Do you know what the motivation is for many young children to return to pornography? Not lust. Not sexual deviance.
Curiosity.
Children are naturally curious. My three year old never stops asking me why. She has whys for the whys. Young children are taking in their world. If pornography gets introduced to them (intentionally or not) their natural response is to seek to understand it to the best of their young understanding.
So, I encourage parents to view pornography as a predator. Stop viewing it as a sin issue for your elementary school aged children. It isn’t. How can that shift in perspective change your reaction?
Raise your hand, moms and dads, if you’ve ever uttered one of these phrases:
“How could you do this to me?”
“What have I done wrong?”
“I’m such a failure.”
Parenting is certainly not easy and, for many, it feels like a high and daunting calling. For Christian parents, we may feel a need to protect our children from every dark and sinister temptation the world has to offer, especially pornography.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a parent who hasn’t been affected by pornography in some way. They may have or have had their own struggle with it or they may have been seriously wounded by someone else’s struggle with it.
Perhaps you are a mom who grew up in a home with a dad and brothers who were steeped in pornography. You watched it rip apart your parents’ marriage and wreck your brothers’ relationships. Or you’re the husband whose wife still struggles with pornography.
These wounds can cause us to be rather passionate about protecting our children from the same effects. When our best efforts of protection fail and we find our kids have been watching pornography, it can feel like a knife to the heart. We get angry with our kids or ourselves and start to build walls.
But these are actually some of the sign posts of shame (more on those in my book, Quenched, and the book The Cry of the Soul by Dan Allender).
Do not view your child’s exposure to or indulgence in pornography as a personal attack against you.
Is pornography damaging? Yes. Is it frustrating when pornography slips past your best defenses? Yes. Is your kid out to get you? Probably not.
Again, remember that for most young children, curiosity kills the cat. They really aren’t sitting around daydreaming ways to break your heart. It might feel like it some days!
Have you completely failed them if they get exposed to pornography? No! Children are remarkably resilient and when you are able to interact with them in a way that addresses the actual issue (curiosity) and not make it about you, you can actually help them navigate through this faster and you set your relationship up for future success. They will start to see you as a safe place to be able to have hard, even disappointing, conversations. But if you steep it in shame and guilt-trips and talks about lust, you are not helping.
If pornography has been a source of pain or trauma in your own story, I encourage you to work through that with the help of a licensed counselor. The pain is real but your child is not responsible for it nor are they destined to repeat it.
You’ve probably heard this before, but when it comes to pornography, it’s often not a matter of if but when your child will be exposed to it. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to protect them!
What it does mean is that protection doesn’t look like silence.
I’ve encountered this in countless families and churches, this idea that we need to keep silent to protect innocence. I served as a Sunday school teacher for high school girls and the pastors in that church asked me not to talk about my story because they didn’t want to expose some of the girls unnecessarily. Meanwhile, the other girls in the class were talking about how they snuck out back and slept with a youth group guy or gave some guy from the school oral sex in the church sanctuary.
Because I wasn’t “allowed” to discuss sex or pornography in our class, the only voice these girls were hearing on the matter was that from their friends. Their parents thought by silencing me they were saving their children, but in reality, they weren’t saving anyone. And that’s with teenagers.
Silence gives parents a false sense of security.
Here’s the thing: You, mom and dad, are not and have never been your child’s only source of information. Even my three year old has alternate sources of information: her Sunday school class, kids at the playground, people she overhears in a restaurant, her babysitter, her grandparents, the family who lives next door, and so on.
Just because you aren’t talking about something doesn’t mean they aren’t hearing about it.
When it comes to young children, this is a problem, because what you may not realize is kids award “expert points” to whoever tells them something first. If Susie’s first grade classmate tells her the world is flat and offers some proof, you are going to be hard-pressed to convince your child otherwise, unless she’s already been exposed to the idea that the world is round.
In other words, you protect their innocence not by keeping your mouth shut but by being the first to the punch. Don’t just assume your kid will “know better.” They don’t “know” anything. They are learning, and it’s your job to teach them. They can’t “know better” unless you’ve TOLD them.
The problem parents run into is that they think of any conversation about sex as some sort of super deluxe all or nothing atomic bomb of a conversation. Then they get all nervous about when is the right time to drop this on their kid. Too early, and you scar them for life. Too late, and you’ve missed your window.
But conversations about human sexuality, pornography, gender, identity, sex, lust, and so on don’t have to be an all or nothing atomic bomb. They can be natural, as-needed conversations.
Silence nurtures shame. You think your silence is communicating “I love you and I’m trying to protect you” but all your kid hears is “you can’t talk to me about this, go ask someone else.”
You will do yourself a huge favor as a parent if you stop sweating and stressing over “the talk” and just let your child lead the need for the conversation. It’s not a bomb you drop. It’s answers you have to their questions. Set yourself up as someone with answers and a willingness to talk not as someone with borderline anxiety about sex and who refuses to even utter the word until your kids have a driver’s license.
The reality is the landscape of the world is changing. Kids have access to pornography younger and younger and are being exposed at alarming rates. It’s scary as a parent. Even as a parent who speaks and teaches in this field, I feel unprepared to help my daughters navigate the world that waits for them. That’s why listening to them and being in conversation with them is so important. There’s no other way for me, or you, and any parent to know the depth and bredth of what their kids are facing. There’s no way for us to know what questions they have. There’s no other way for them to know they can come to us for answers and help.
The only way for me to truly combat the influence pornography can have on their lives and to protect them is for me to be actively involved with them. To be educating them. To be in conversation with them, understanding what they are seeing, hearing, and experiencing from sources outside of our home.
As parents, we can’t afford to sit back and assume our internet filters are enough. We can’t assume our silence is helpful. We can’t live in fear, paralyzed by our own pasts with pornography and trauma.
One of the best things we can do for our children, in addition to doing our best to protect them, is to be a safe place for them to come to when all of our protection fails.
Some helpful resources for parents:
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]]>This tells us two things:
First, it tells us that marriage won’t fix your porn problem.
Second, it tells us we need to address the issues that are unique to married women who struggle with pornography.
I posted something on Facebook recently in regards to the question, “What would I tell a wife whose husband is going to be gone for a while and has asked for pictures of her so that he doesn’t look at porn?”
This is not an uncommon or unheard of scenario in my life. My brother is an over-the-road trucker and is away from his family for weeks at a time. My husband is military so our circle of friends are filled with deployments and long times away from each other. In fact, even in our own home, we are in a bit of an “in place” deployment where I see my husband for maybe an hour or two each day during the week and most of that time, we’re tag-teaming parenting two toddlers before falling exhausted into bed.
Just the very attitude of “if you don’t give me this I’m going to be looking at something else” reeks of entitlement, selfishness, and the “men have zero self-control and women are the gatekeepers of men’s sexuality” mindset that can be rampant in some conservative Christian groups. But the reality is if any husband comes up to his wife and says, “Either you give me pictures of you or I’m going to look at porn” that reveals a deeper issue in his own heart.
Unsurpisingly, I received a response, from a burner Facebook account, that said my answer was garbage. Didn’t I know women struggle with lust and masturbation? (Yes, yes I did know). Would I tell women the same thing? (Yes, yes I would).
There are probably countless blog posts and resources out there telling wives how to keep their husbands from falling to pornography. I likely agree with few of them because I don’t think it’s the wife’s job to keep her husband from struggling with pornography. It’s important to recognize that lust is a heart issue and we as people have zero control over other people’s heart issues. When we make someone else responsible for our own actions, attitudes, and heart issues, that’s called manipulation.
If I fly off the handle in anger at my husband or my kids, I have two courses of action. I can take responsibility for my own actions and recognize that self-control is exactly that– control of self– or I can blame them for pushing my buttons, yadda yadda yadda and make it their problem that they need to do better with next time. The second choice removes me from all responsibility for my own actions and relieves me of the Biblical command to walk in the Spirit.
What that tells me is the husband has no self-control. As long as we encourage him to blame his wife, he will always find a way to do so.
She gained too much weight. She didn’t sleep with him three times last week. She doesn’t look good in his favorite dress anymore. She complains too much. She keeps talking about emotion and how she just wants him to listen. She asks him to… gasp… do the dishes. She didn’t drop everything to “meet his needs” while she tended to their sick children. She didn’t pose for nude pictures for him to save on his phone. She actually asked to go to sleep early one night.
The nerve.
But all of these arguments tend to fall apart when it’s the wife who is struggling with pornography.
That’s because the narrative for so many years decades has been that men are the sexual ones and women are not. In fact, in Christian circles sexual women are often equated to harlots. I once found an excerpt from an old book on marriage for Christian wives where the author (a woman) specifically instructed wives that they are not to enjoy sex. The concept that a Christian wife could experience sexual temptation (not romantic temptation- sexual) is beyond the realm of concept for many people.
The truth is, though, that men and women are both sexual creatures. We both can be visually stimulated. We both have emotions. We both have desires. We both can experience sexual pleasure. Of the two, women are the ones who have an organ devoted to sexual pleasure. So the idea that women are not supposed to experience desire, arousal, or pleasure is wrong. Therefore, this idea that women cannot struggle with sexual temptation is also wrong. Women, single and married, can be tempted to acheive sexual arousal or pleasure in the same ways men can.
And, if they do, it’s not their husband’s fault (just like it’s not the wife’s fault if the husband does).
First thing, tell your husband.
I can understand why this would be completely terrifying for some, especially if you got married fiercely holding onto the good Christian girl, bride wearing white image of purity and feel that the only reason your husband married you is because he thought you were a saint. You’re not. He’s not. You both are people. Fallen people who live in a fallen world and shame and secrets never make a marriage better.
This isn’t about him being your “accountability partner.” You’re not blaming him. You’re not asking him to fix it. What you are doing is removing a wall of shame from your marriage. It paves the way for healing, freedom, and intimacy.
Understand that he might be upset or shocked, especially if he felt like you lied to him, etc. Again, fallen people in a fallen world, and if you’re worried about how this conversation could affect your marriage, enlist the help of a counselor. Have the conversation with someone else who can help you both navigate this because it is something you both need to navigate.
If you’ve been using pornography during your marriage, eradicating it and learning to find satisfaction and pleasure with just your husband is going to be hard. It’s going to be a journey. You need to let him in on that. It’s a journey you’re taking together. Could you do it without telling him? Probably. But then you’re going to spend the rest of your marriage still worried about what will happen when he finds out.
Intimacy and shame cannot coexist.
Second, tell someone else.
Also terrifying, I know. But what this does is it helps alleviate the burden your husband may feel to do something to fix it. You can tell a close female friend or a counselor. Whoever you tell, the point is to get someone else on the team, someone else with an outside perspective who doesn’t view you as their wife and doesn’t run the risk of being personally wounded by your failures.
Even though porn is not a struggle in my marriage, I still have a close female friend who I have known for almost twenty years. She knew about this struggle long before I wrote books about it and I know that if I were ever to feel tempted, I could reach out to her. This is especially helpful in situations like the one I’m in now where my husband isn’t always immediately available. Sometimes, he can’t get to his phone for hours at a time.
Third, get rid of the porn.
Perhaps this seems like a “no duh” step, but I think there are many who would tell their husband, tell a friend, but then hold on to the porn like a bit of a security blanket. I’m not going to watch it; I’m just going to keep these couple videos, you know, just in case.
There is no just in case. I understand that the road to rewiring can be frustrating. I get that. Even though I never struggled with porn while being married, I went into marriage with an arousal template based on pornography, fantasy, and masturbation. It took a long time to work through that and to teach my body to respond to my husband. Running back to porn in that time would have undone any forward progress we had made. It’s not a security blanket.
If you’re serious about freedom, then you need to, in a moment of strength, do everything you can to make porn innaccessible or at least inconvenient. If you want to install an accountability software like Covenant Eyes, do that. Clear your history. Delete your favorites. Delete the apps you’re using to access. Set up screen time and have your husband or a friend set up the passcode. Do what you need to do to protect your journey of freedom.
If you’re struggling with mental imagery and such, I just wrote a blog post on that here.
Fourth, be honest about your triggers and temptations.
Understand that this is going to be a continuing conversation and a continuous journey. It’s not like you tell your husband one day, delete the apps off your phone and *poof* everything is better and you never talk about it again. There are going to be days when you are tempted. There are going to be times when you feel triggered. When you are silent about those times, you give them the environment they need to grow into something bigger.
I think of one instance in our marriage. I sat down to watch a new show on NetFlix. It looked interesting and I didn’t even notice it was rated MA. Initially, it seemed very promising. But within two minutes there was full-frontal nudity… of a man.
Color me completely shocked. I backed out of that show as quickly as possible and, when my husband got home from work, I let him know what happened. It’s not his fault. I’m not expecting him to do anything, but telling him helps it not be a secret and nips any sort of shame in the bud. I’m not in trouble. He’s not in trouble. In a sexualized society, this sort of exposure can happen. Temptation happens. Triggers happen. Calling them out depletes their power.
Ideally, it’s helpful to avoid these temptations and triggers, but sometimes you can’t. In that case, identifying them is helpful.
If you want to do more work on triggers, I have an free resource specifically for working through them.
Fifth, do the work.
You have some rebuilding to do. Pornography can do a number on your self-image, your understanding of relationships, and your view of sex. That means this journey goes beyond “stop watching porn.” There are depths of healing that can take place and should take place to help pornography become less appealing. It’s not anyone else’s job to do that heart work. It’s not your husband’s job, or your best friend’s job, or your counselor’s job. What you will find is as you heal these areas, pornography has less and less appeal.
Ultimately, what you want is a healthy, vibrant, marriage marked by genuine intimacy. It’s not all about sex. It’s about the partnership and the connection and there being no shame between the two of you. If you want to porn-proof your marriage, the best way to do that is by building a marriage that is so sacred and so beautiful that pornography feels like an affront to it, not an aid. Don’t turn your partner into pornography. That helps no one. Instead, purpose together to root out the lies of pornography and false images pornography presents and create something that is wholly, uniquely, and authentically you.
This takes time. It takes effort. But it’s worth it.
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]]>This isn’t a problem exclusive to women who have struggled with pornography.
There is an increasing awareness of the term “mental load” and how in many couples the women carry the burden of the mental load. It’s the women who are constantly aware of the needs in the home, etc. It’s the women who know what has been cleaned and what hasn’t, what is on the menu for the week, what the children need, and what household tasks didn’t get done that day. That pile of burdens and internal checklists can lead to completely unromantic encounters like mentally planning the grocery list while our husbands are trying to get us in the mood.
Nothing says “I’m into you” like trying to plan what you’re packing in everyone’s lunches tomorrow.
For women who have a past or current struggle with pornography, their mental wandering isn’t quite the same as reminding yourself to do the dishes while your husband plants kisses on your neck. Instead, it’s replacing your husband with the star of the latest romance novel or envisioning yourself in the last video you watched. And it brings with it the guilt and shame of feeling like you are essentially cheating on your spouse while actually sleeping with them.
It’s a surefire way to confuse a heart and a mind and get you so tangled up in shame around something that is intended to be beautiful, connecting, and shame-free. You might say to yourself, “But I love my husband, I would never cheat on him. Why am I doing this?”
And the answer has to do with triggers. Think about other things that can be “triggered.”
I struggle with anxiety and could give you a list of situations that I know trigger it. I know that if someone is late to pick me up, that’s a trigger. What does that mean? That means that my body’s response to that situation is somewhat automatic. My body has been conditioned, through whatever circumstance, to react a certain way to that trigger, so when that trigger happens, it sets off a series of events that feel very automatic and out of my control.
That’s a frustrating problem, because here you are, wanting to be connected to your husband and not wanting pornography to have a place in your marriage, but yet every time your husband tries to start something, it triggers memories associated with pornography or fantasy or whatever. Before you know it, instead of enjoying your husband, you’re lost in a mindmaze and just wishing the whole thing could hurry up and be over.
Or, like the woman whose story I share in my recent book, you have your mind and body so conditioned to be dependent on pornography, you have to turn to it in order to experience arousal.
When it comes to a struggle with pornography, triggers are things that make your brain and body think, “Oh hey! We’ve been here before. We know where to go. Thank you. We’ll just take it from here.”
Before you know it, your super computer of a brain has pulled up all sorts of stimuli that has done the trick before. The problem, as you know, is you don’t want that stimuli. You want the current stimuli (ie. your spouse).
I’m going to give you some tips, and I want to preface this by saying just because you struggle with this doesn’t mean you don’t love your spouse. I feel like I need to emphasize that because so much of the narrative around pornography is, “It’s the same as cheating and if you do it that means you don’t truly love your husband/wife.” That’s not typically the heart attitude of someone searching “How do I stay connected with my husband.” That’s not the motivation of someone who is grieved that this images are popping up.
We have to understand that lust is a heart issue while pornography, the struggle with it and our seeming dependence on it can very much be a physiological one. Think of it similarly to someone who is struggling with anxiety. There’s worry and fear which can be heart and faith issues, but the physical response of an anxiety or panic attack is not a heart or faith issue. It’s physiological. That doesn’t mean we’re powerless to do anything about it, but it does help to have that understanding from the beginning. We need to know what type of battle we’re fighting.
There’s a difference between the wife who has zero interest in her husband and sneaks off into the bathroom and pulls up porn on her phone to get aroused and the woman who is in bed with her spouse, trying her best to be present and intimate with him and finds herself plagued by images of her past. Those are two different struggles and I am speaking to the latter.
(Again, I feel like these apply to any woman who finds her mind wandering off on rabbit trails.)
This seems so unromantic and perhaps even unnatural. That’s because the framework we have for physical intimacy is that two relative strangers decide to hookup and magically somehow each knows exactly what the other wants without either saying anything. They know exactly what to do, where to touch, how to touch, and without a word seemlessly go from point A to heated ecstasy.
This is not real life.
Talk to your spouse. Tell him what feels good, if you enjoy something or if you don’t, if you’d like to take a little longer at this stage or if you’re ready to move on. If your brain isn’t in the game, ask him for five minutes just so you can process your day with him. If you find your mind wandering into pornographic territory, ask him to talk to you. Switch it up and ask him what he would like and what would feel good to him. Talking is one of the ways we help build connection and keep our brain in the present.
This might seem like it should go without saying, after all this is physical intimacy. It’s basically the most touching you can possibly get, but I challenge you, the next time you find your mind wandering, see where your hands are. If you’ve ever had a massage, you probably know it is completely possible to space out and disengage even while being touched.
One of my husband and my favorite books on communication in marriage, With These Words, shares that a break in physical connection often accompanies a break in mental and emotional connection. The book is specifically addressing disagreements and arguments, but I think the same could be said for in the bedroom. If your mind is starting to recall the last video you watched or some other fantasy odds are you might be being touched more than you are the one touching.
Move your hands around. Pay attention to what you’re feeling. I’d even encourage women not to be afraid to touch their own bodies in this process or grab your husband’s hand and put it where you want it. However you are comfortable, engage your sense of touch.
Predictability is a precursor to boredom. If sex becomes formulaic, your brain is more likely to search for variety. We enjoy variety in so many areas of life from food to scenery to music. This shouldn’t be any different.
Sometimes you want and crave the tried and true because there’s a comfort in that, but there are times that call for new and adventuresome. Sex is meant to be fun. Next time you feel your mind wandering down XXX memory lane, see it as a sign that you’re craving something different and think of just one thing you can change. You’re welcome to think of more, but for some of us, one is enough to add the variety we’re craving.
On this note, I have had women reach out to me sharing that they feel like they can’t ask to try certain things because they are afraid their partner will feel it’s influenced by pornography. I understand this. I struggled with pornography for years. I doubt you could name a position or sexual act that I hadn’t seen. So, for a while I was very afraid to suggest anything in our marriage because I didn’t want to feel like our sex life was inspired by pornography. Shame over my past was keeping me from enjoying my present.
Here’s the thing, porn didn’t write the book on sex. It doesn’t have a corner market on it. It didn’t invent sex. It didn’t invent sexual positions. It didn’t invent types of foreplay.
If it helps, find a Christian group with suggestions and use that. One of my favorites is Kingdom Sexuality on Instagram. They have an entire highlight of sexual positions. So if you’re at all worried about your bedroom being “inspired by” pornography, instead, sit down with your husband and go through some of these positions and make note of which you would like to try. That exercise in itself could be a whole new level of foreplay!
How many times have you been in the middle of praying and had an unwanted image just sort of pop up on the back of your eyelids? If you’ve been there then you understand the power of our sight to help us stay connected to what’s going on around us. This applies to the bedroom too. Closing our eyes is one of the easiest ways to disengage. Keeping the lights off is one of the easiest ways to disconnect.
There are different reasons we do this. Some women just don’t feel comfortable in their own skin and prefer a dark room. Others don’t enjoy having their retinas fried by staring into the lights on the ceiling fan. For some couples, the only time they can be intimate is in the middle of the night and turning on every light in the room doesn’t sound appealing. I would encourage you to buy some flameless candles. You can even get remote operated ones. You could also buy a small nightlight (we have one like this) or turn on a light in an adjacent room or closet.
Song of Song’s (Song of Solomon) is filled with sensual sensory language, and a lot of it is visual.
Behold, you are beautiful, my love,
behold, you are beautiful!
Your eyes are doves
behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping down the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes
that have come up from the washing,
all of which bear twins,
and not one among them has lost its young.
Your lips are like a scarlet thread,
and your mouth is lovely.
Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind your veil.
Your neck is like the tower of David,
built in rows of stone;
on it hang a thousand shields,
all of them shields of warriors.
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that graze among the lilies. (4:1-5 ESV)
Your eyes are a powerful tool in your fight. Your past with pornography proves you are a visual person, so don’t blind yourself to what is happening right now! That just gives your brain an opportunity to fill in the blanks. Buy some extra mirrors so you can see what’s going on. Your eyes are not your enemy. They are part of the experience.
I feel like more people need to hear this but orgasms aren’t the point of sex. They’re great, yes, and more time should be devoted to women experiencing sexual pleasure. But, when we start intimacy with the goal of “get me to an orgasm” our brain responds with, “I know how to do this!” That’s when we start pulling up all of the pornography and fantasy. That’s what used to work. That’s the stimuli that got the job done.
If you want to help retrain your brain, give it a new goal it hasn’t faced before. Instead of “sexual pleasure” give it the goal of “I want to get to know my husband better. I want to understand what he likes and I want us to laugh.” There’s no blueprint for that in pornography.
That entire gameplan centers on you having to stay present with your husband. Your brain doesn’t have shortcuts for that. That means it might take longer at first. That means you might go a few rounds without an orgasm as you learn to celebrate connection in other ways. But what’s really neat is as you experience arousal and pleasure through getting to know your husband better, that then becomes the pathway of choice. And because it involves all of your senses, that then becomes a more powerful stimuli than pornography.
If you’re a married woman who has had this struggle, I would love to hear what has worked for you. Shoot me an email at contact@beggarsdaughter.com. I’m hoping to put together a resource for married women and the more perspectives and stories, the better!
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